Posts by author
Kyle Williams
-
To Become Louder, Even Still
We can’t change our community, and ourselves, if we don’t foster a dialogue about how power is abused within it, and the only way to do that is to empower survivors to speak. Following recently forced awareness, Muriel Leung, editor…
-
Leduc Revisited
To write is to be liberate oneself. Untrue. To write is to change nothing. Writing for the Guardian, Rafia Zakaria tells us about Violette Leduc: discovered by Simone de Beauvoir and published by Albert Camus, Leduc, the sexually explicit lesbian…
-
Ablaze with Care
As we said our vows, we were undone. We wept, besotted with our luck. Maggie Nelson, interviewed by Paul Laity for the Guardian, talks about her life before and during her deservedly acclaimed autobiotheoreticalnovel The Argonauts, from following Eileen Myles to New…
-
Or Smash the Mold Straight Off
If this sounds like a Women’s Lib rap, baby, it is. For The New Republic, Michelle Dean writes a lovely and winding essay on the life and feminism of Adrienne Rich: its origins in breaking meter, discovery through therapy, her…
-
The Singular They
For the New York Times, Amanda Hess gives us a brief history of the increasingly prominent and ambiguously-gendered singular they, from usage in Shakespeare to Girls and The Argonauts.
-
What Was Once Breathing
Iraqis are generalized as victims, refugees, or, in the worst case, corpses. Betty Rosen, writing for The Point, dives into Iraqi fiction and its relationship with corpses as a way of practicing radical empathy in troubling times, with Sinan Antoon’s…
-
The Crisis of Man
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Robert Zaretsky writes about Albert Camus’s one and only visit to the United States, to New York City, and how the questions of absurdity, meaning, and rebellion Camus’s visit raised for him still…
-
Autofiction and Empathy
Reading novels breaks down the boundary between “me” and “not me.” Over at the Atlantic, Nicholas Dames writes about a deeply worrying feeling that contemporary fiction isn’t living up to Cervantes’s standards, opting for nihilistic individualism rather than empathy.
-
Present and Urgent
Even as artists we are products of our world—all our experiences are part of the material that we employ in our art. Over at Lit Hub, Matthew Daddona interviews poet Kwame Dawes on his poetry, the publication of African poetry…
-
The Hardest Thing to Survive
As a kid I was that literal, thinking I lived in fiction, so let me write it. It started there, and it seems it’s going to end there. In a conversation excerpted from Upstairs at the Strand, Junot Diaz and Hilton…
-
Seeing Double
The new issue of the revived The Scofield is out, spotlighting the work of Dambudzo Marechera and a favorite literary motif: the doppelgänger. The magazine revisits classics from the likes of Poe and Dostoevsky, offers theoretical views on the doppelgänger, and shares…